Absolute Zero
by august
Summary: "I did my best; it wasn't much. I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch."


Title: Absolute Zero  
Author: august  
Email: appelsini@hotmail.com  
Spoilers: Everything to Requiem  
Codes: V, A, M/S  
  
Summary: "I did my best; it wasn't much. I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch." - L. Cohen  
  
*** indicates a change in narrator  
  
  
  
Absolute Zero  
By august (appelsini@hotmail.com)  
cJuly 2000  
  
  
Anything can be broken, under the right pressure. Just add heat, or water, or light or Donnie Pfaster's hands binding   
yours for the second time. Diamonds can only be scratched with diamonds but glass can be shattered by a single note   
and skin can melt off hands like napalm gloves. Everything has a point that turns it inside out.   
  
* * *   
  
At his house the other day, waiting for him to change shirts after an accident with a diet coke, I hit play on the VCR.   
It's like a mutant roulette, I'm never disappointed with what I find in there. I'll admit though, it shocked the hell out of   
me to see images of myself on screen.   
  
It was the godawful COPS show. The bastard had taped it, after all. The bastard had kept it.   
  
It was hypnotic. I was transfixed in front of the screen, watching the event unfold before me, all over again. Our   
generation has two memories – the real and the digital. It surprises me how things are just a little bit off. I do not   
remember things exactly this way.   
  
I could hear him rustle behind me. "What are you watching?"   
  
"I thought you said you didn't watch this." I said, without turning around, training my eye on my image on the screen.   
He didn't answer and when I finally turned to him, he just shrugged. We stood and watched the show in silence. The   
Mulder on the screen was thrusting a drawing of a werewolf in front of the camera. I realised for the first time, god,   
how much of a raving lunatic he sounds, sometimes.   
  
He laughs at the screen. "They didn't edit it well, did they?"   
  
"No?"   
  
"I sound mad, Scully!" He grins at me, like only a man who has been institutionalised twice can.   
  
"Mulder, you suggested that they were looking for a werewolf! What sane law enforcement officer wouldn't want to   
see your ID-"   
  
"-This is my favourite bit." He interrupts me and I turn back to the screen. I see myself in the autopsy bays, bathed in   
white light. Some sort of deranged angel, packing bone saws.   
  
"Because the FBI has nothing to hide." The Scully on the screen smiles almost seductively at the camera.   
  
(When did I start thinking of myself as Scully?)   
  
Mulder leans forward and flicks off the television. "Let's go, we'll be late." He picks up his gun and I follow him out   
the door. Trying not to think about the fact that Mulder kept this video. Trying not to think about the fact that   
Mulder has a favourite bit, of me. Trying not to think about what that means.   
  
* * *   
  
When it's three in the morning and I'm drunk, baying at the moon, my thoughts turn, always, to Scully.   
  
She's a good mark, Scully, much better than me. She can take a light out from 100 metres. She can take a person out   
from across the room. She took Donnie Pfaster out with a blood stare and a room that cried gunpowder for days.   
  
When it's three in the morning and I'm drunk, baying at the moon, I find myself heading to Georgetown. I turn back,   
always, (mostly) before I get there, believing that she won't let a drunk, rambling Mulder into her house. Believing,   
sometimes, that she will.   
  
She told me, once, when we were driving through the night, that I use her as a Samantha substitute. That I try to save   
her, that I want to save her. She told me that it was a killing thing, a heavy thing, that she will never be who I want.   
We stared straight ahead, looking at the disappearing road and focussing on the darkness. It was easier to pretend I   
hadn't heard, than to think about the people I turn into my sister.   
  
We drove through the night then, stopping only at a petrol station.  
"Scully?" I could use her name as an apology.  
"I'm fine, Mulder." She said, without looking back.  
  
  
"I'm fine" may be positive affirmation, but in Scully they're hurting words, they're deadly words, speaking of sickness   
and aliens and loneliness.   
  
So when it's three in the morning and I'm drunk, baying at the moon, my thoughts turn always to Scully. But I do not.   
I cannot. I have to leave something.   
  
* * *   
  
He read his sister's diary in a roadside diner.   
  
The first time he talked about his sister, I listened with a kind of disbelief. Until I joined the X-files, I had never given   
aliens, abductions or implants more than a Steven Spielberg second thought. There's nothing like an abduction-  
induced coma, a dead sister and an immaculately conceived child to make you reassess your position.   
  
With a clinical detachment, I can profile Samantha Mulder's role in her brother's life. With a clinical detachment, I can   
talk about idealising the dead, emotional detachment and barriers. Using the untouchable as a reason not to touch   
anything in this life. With the clinical detachment I slip into so easily these days, I can acknowledge that he is a skilled   
enough profiler to know this about himself, to understand this about himself.   
  
It's just that Mulder is the only thing I can never really clinically detach from.   
  
(My brother says to me, "is it worth it?"  
I say to my brother, "it has to be."  
My brother says to me, "you could have been so much more."  
I say to my brother, "I am so much more.")  
  
  
And so we got dragged into the LaPierre madness – I got dragged into this LaPierre madness by a Mulder who never   
really seems to understand how dead children turn me inside out. And then we're sitting in this tacky diner and he's   
holding something real and tangible of Samantha's, after all these years. This diary scares me more than being without   
a firearm.   
  
He flicks through the pages distractedly, like he barely knows where to start. I'm not sure I was ready to believe it, at   
the time. Samantha has been resurrected and killed for us so many times, I was waiting for the punch line. His voice   
shakes as he reads, and I think that I hate Samantha then, in all her incarnations. Confidences are never kind, are   
never selfless. There are tears in my eyes.   
  
Mulder is more than his search for his sister. He is more than his work, his quest, although he would like to believe it   
is the culmination of his life. But outside it, around it, above it, beyond it things still exist. The Knicks still play. The   
black oil still exists. Capitol Hill traffic is still a bitch. I still eat yoghurt for lunch.   
  
"It's over." He says later, looking at the skies. Fuelled with memories of crying from chemo and dry retching in the   
toilets after Emily's funeral, I can hate him then. For thinking that it could be over. For never really letting it be my   
life, too.   
  
* * *   
  
There are nights where I begin what I like to call the Scully mind-fuck. How not to fuck Scully in your mind as you   
move in some girl who could be anyone, as long as she's not Scully. I think she does this as well. I know she goes   
out, sometimes. I hate those times when I call her apartment, when I call for her and she's not there.   
  
I don't get drunk and stalk her, I don't go over there at four a.m. demanding to fight for her honour. I do the only   
thing I would ever do, I have ever done when it comes to Scully, I walk away. I think about her and then I do   
everything I can not to think about her. The Scully Mind Fuck, patented from the very first year we started working   
together.   
  
She comes into work with bruises sometimes. Not often or sever enough to comment. Sometimes her knees, often   
her wrists. I don't see them unless she shifts in a chair, or reaches across the table for something. They are   
incongruous with our work bruises: blows to the head, ribs broken by the butts of guns, dislocated shoulders from   
being thrown down stairs.   
  
I don't know what to do with this. I am flooded with images of Scully, her head thrown back, her breath pushed out   
between her lips. If the fate of the world wasn't so often at stake, I would be just another loser who never gets the   
girl.   
  
* * *   
  
The disc is empty. I went on the roadtrip, I played dress-up for the cancerman and the disc is empty. The lonegun   
men check it three times, I check it twice. It's empty.   
  
I can feel his anger from across the room. It's almost enough to make me stand and punch the motherfucker right to   
the floor. I think we judge the ones we trust more harshly than we judge ourselves. Most of the time I want that   
judgement, I need that judgement. But sometimes...   
  
Cancerman told me that I was drawn to powerful men. In one of the more surreal moments in my life, the man who   
has been responsible for so much of the death, for so many of the midnight drives to hospital, tries to play the match-  
making grandfather. Mulder broods, leaning against the doorframe, and all I can think is that this has very little to do   
with power. None of us have power here.   
  
* * *   
  
When I was institutionalised (the second time) I had these dreams. I call them dreams although I don't know,   
technically, that's what they were. The Cancerman was trying to play musical brains and I was having the most bizarre   
scenarios with a starring cast of Oedipal proportions.   
  
And then I was old, and dying. Cancerman was there, telling me that everyone was dead, long dead. It was the most   
terrifying moment of my life. I had never - have never - believed that Scully could die. Even when she was dying, I   
never really believed it would happen.   
  
And then she came to me.   
  
"You're not supposed to die, Mulder-- not here." My imagined Scully said. I was so old and she was the same, except   
the Scully I know never stared me down with such a look of contempt. "Not in a comfortable bed with the devil   
outside."   
  
And in my dream state, I tried to tell myself it wasn't the end. It was only Scully who pulled back the curtains, who   
showed me the armageddon. Who showed me how I failed.   
  
Later, in the real world, Scully takes me to bed. Seven years we've been knocking heads and it culminates on my   
couch. She talks, a little, about the life she could have had. I shut up and listen because when Scully talks in that   
voice, there's nothing else I want to do more. And maybe it's not entirely love between us, maybe it's also fear and   
loneliness but it's Scully who pulls back the curtains and shows me how to work with that.   
  
* * *   
  
He left.   
  
This is not how I imagined it would end.   
  
My parents had a good marriage, I think. I realised, at some point during my time at the FBI, that I would never have   
the life they had. I don't think I wanted that life. My mother's grief at my father's funeral overwhelmed me. I had   
worked with the dead for so long that I sometimes forget there were families. That each heart that weighs   
approximately five hundred grams had flushed with adrenaline over someone.   
  
My parents had a good marriage but it ended. It ended and my mother was alone. And, despite the fact that I have   
lived to avoid this moment, I now find myself in the same position. I told Emily's social worker that I viewed   
emotional connections as a bad thing, as a reminder of the dead. I forgot that there are worse things than dying.   
  
He left.   
  
The lone gunman visit me often. Skinner takes me for dinner every few weeks. Everyone expects me to fall apart; it is   
almost humiliating how little they know me. I have been living in this state of flux for so many years now, I am   
practised at putting myself back together.   
  
I eat well. I exercise often. I occasionally think of how I will tell my child that it's father was abducted by aliens.   
  
This will not be my breaking point.   
  
I'm fine, Mulder.   
  
  
** end **   
  
  
  



End file.
